Adaption to the User's Task

Abstract

Adapting explanations to users with varying background
knowledge and abilities is a difficult task: the explanation content, style,
amount of details, terms used, etc. may be affected in various ways.
We have used our analysis of the information seeking tasks of the users
in one particular domain as a basis for adaptation. We structured the
domain information into a set of information entities where each entity
describes one aspect of a node in the information space. Each information
entity is fitted to one or several information seeking tasks, and by
combining entities we create an explanation adapted to the user's
current task. We do not avoid concepts which are unknown to the user in
our information entities. Instead we allow the users to ask follow-up questions
on those concepts in order to cater the users' differences in background knowledge.
Which follow-up questions are available also depends on the users' current task.
Finally, we emphasise the need to make the difference between the adapted
explanations obvious to the user. Only then can the users predict which
explanations best fit their need and thereby control the self-adaptive
mechanisms of the system. So, our system is adaptive to the information
seeking task of the user, while the user's knowledge, abilities and roles,
are catered for by other means.